Where to Eat in Celina, Texas

Celina's downtown square is where the food scene lives. Toasted Walnut is an upscale-casual farm-to-table restaurant right on the square, paired with a small boutique. A few doors down, Lucy's on the Square serves breakfast, lunch, dinner, and homemade pie in a brick building more than a century old.

The square is walkable and social, and these two anchor a downtown that's kept its historic character while filling in with new places to eat.

For barbecue, Tender Smokehouse is a family-owned Texas spot doing the smoked-meat staples. And Rollertown Beerworks is Celina's brewery and taproom — a popular hangout that brings in food trucks and hosts live music and comedy nights.

Between the barbecue and the beer, Celina has a couple of real destination spots that pull people to the square in the evenings.

One of Celina's more unusual spots is the Little Wooden Penguin, an experience space that combines a store, restaurant, and bar with putt-putt golf, live music, a succulent bar, and 28 taps of rotating craft beer and draft wine, plus daily food trucks.

It's part restaurant, part entertainment, and it's the kind of place that gives Celina more personality than its size suggests. For a wider range, Frisco and McKinney are a short drive south.